While Dragon Turtle eggs are slightly different, much of the process for egg care is very similar.

Preparation

The first requirement for breeding chickens, as any good farmer will tell you, is having somewhere to house them. Seek out your local carpenter, or grab your trusty saw if you have the skill, and get yourself a chicken coop (or two, or even three). You will not need a coop for Dragon Turtle Hatchlings, they must be housed in the stable. Turtle Dragon egg owners should now go straight to Egg Care

Each chicken coop can house up to three chickens, chicken lizards or battle chicken lizards.
The coop must be locked down or secured to be functional, it will not work if inside a container.
While you’ve got the saw handy (or the local carpenter) you’ll also need an incubator for your eggs

Chicken Coop Functionality

The chicken coop does not count towards normal stable slots (data and stats are stored on the coop).

This means that you can only claim a chicken from the coop it was stabled in.

If the coop is released and re-secured elsewhere (moving house for eg) all chickens are safely transported within

Other Requirements

You will need food – hay, bought from npc farmers or farmers’ markets (hay does not stack). Not to be confused with wheat which grows freely in the fields around Britain, Yew and Moonglow farms. Chicken lizards will not eat wheat.
You will also need a water pitcher. Note: Stacking hay can sometimes be found in merchant ship holds, although the chicken lizards will eat this, and give the expected ‘your pet looks happier’ message it has been found that chicken lizards fed on this hay do not lay eggs!

Populating the Coop

Now you are ready to catch your breeding stock of chicken lizards You will find them running wild in Ter Mur, just outside the Royal City. Beware of silver serpents in the area to the west of the city, spawn is safer, but much less prolific, in the housing area to the East. Use taming skill to capture your chicken, it may take several attempts if you have no training in the skill, but it is possible.

Return home with your new aquisition, feed it and stable it in the coop using the coop’s context menu. You must now wait one real time week for the chicken lizard to bond, at that point feed it again and re-stable the now bonded chick.

Egg Laying

Eggs are laid when the bonded chicken lizard is fed, feed once per day only. If an egg is not laid, feeding it again on the same day will not cause an egg to be laid. The first egg chance occurs on the day after bonding, thereafter the chicken will lay a maximum of two eggs per week.

It is possible to short-cut this process by killing chicken lizards and finding an egg in the corpse, however these eggs are quite rare and killing the creatures causes substantial karma loss.

Egg Care

Care for your eggs by placing them in the incubator and watering them once per day (24 hours) with a water pitcher for 3 days (72 hours). During incubation the egg will change size and hue , if the egg contains a battle chicken the final hue will denote the color of the bird. Dragon Turtle eggs do not change hue.

At the end of 72 hours a mature, well cared for egg has a 10% chance of hatching into a battle chicken, unless of course it’s a dragon turtle egg.
If you are not going to hatch your egg on the day it matures, remove it from the incubator. Leaving it in the incubator will cause it to burn.

Eggs can be removed from the incubator at any stage during growth, when moved the egg will check whether the new location is an incubator or not. If not, the egg will not continue to mature. When returned to an incubator the incubation timer will re-start from where it left off, checking every hour whether or not it has gone over the maximum incubation time.

Egg Incubation Stages

Freshly laid egg, not yet incubated

Stage 1 incubation completed – egg moist

Stage 2 incubation completed – egg moist

Stage 3 incubation completed – egg mature and ready to be hatched

Stage 4 incubation completed – egg burnt. A burnt egg will not hatch

Consequences of Neglect

You cannot over-water the eggs, but if you do not water them properly they will either take a long time to age or will eventually burn.

Watering missed three times – The egg will not grow, 100% burning risk

Egg Descriptions & Meanings

A chicken lizard egg – newly laid or less than 24 hours old

A dry chicken lizard egg – a healthy egg in need of water. Water once.

A moist chicken lizard egg – a healthy egg which has been watered

A parched chicken lizard egg – a neglected egg in need of water. Water twice.

A dehydrated chicken lizard egg – a very neglected egg in need of water. Water three times

A burnt chicken lizard egg – a severely neglected egg, water will not help. You killed it.

A mature chicken lizard egg – a healthy egg ready to be hatched. Make sure you have room for it in your coop.

A mature battle chicken lizard egg – this egg will hatch into a battle chicken, see below.

Turtle Dragon Eggs have a slightly different description.

Hatching the Egg

The egg will not automatically hatch, you will need to double click it to break the shell – you will get a confirmation gump for this. The egg can be hatched at any growth stage but prematurely hatched and burnt eggs will crumble and you will get a message to say that you failed. Mature eggs will reveal an untamed chicken lizard, battle chicken lizard or Dragon Turtle hatchling and the egg shell will be destroyed.

Tame the chicken lizard, feed it to start the bonding process and stable it in the coop. Chicken owners are advised to hatch Battle chicken eggs in a confined space to facilitate taming.

Dragon Turtle hatchlings have a minimum taming requirement of 104.7 skill. If you do not have this skill do not hatch the egg! As with Battle chickens a restricted space may be advisable for the taming process.

Battle Chicken Lizards

Battle Chicken Lizards are a stronger, more colorful version of the creature having base damage of 4 to 7 instead of 2 to 5 and much higher starting skills. An ideal battle chicken lizard will have strength above 125 when hatched, on rare occasions dex and int figures in excess of 125 on hatching have also been recorded. All skills can be trained to GM and all three stats can raise to 125.

Battle chicken lizards lay eggs, both normal and battle chicken. Research has found conflicting information regarding battle chickens and their progeny. Some people have found that battle chickens lay more frequently than normal chicken lizards but others have not experienced the same increase. Some people have found that the best battle chickens are hatched from eggs laid by battle chickens, whereas one Battle Chicken league reports that all recorded ‘champion’ chickens within that league were hatched from eggs laid by normal chicken lizards. My conclusion is that one must hope that your battle chicken eggs are blessed by the RNG.